The state of Texas, in the United States of America, recently developed a policy that requires schools to provide supplemental support for students who are not doing well on standardized tests. These supports are supposed to be personalized to the needs of the students. Originally, the statute required that schools provide teacher tutors to those students needing extra support and also required that those teacher tutors meet with the students one-on-one. However, many school districts found that they did not have enough teachers or paraprofessionals who could act as tutors and meet the needs of the students. Thus, new policy and statute were introduced to allow schools to use personalized software to meet the needs of these students as long as the software passed a rigorous evaluation whereby the software vendor presented data showing that the software could lead to student learning gains at a level that was even better than when a student had access to face-to-face tutoring. My team was involved in the evaluation of these software packages.

This paper analyzes the development of the rubric and evaluation processes that we undertook to evaluate these software packages. Literature is reviewed on the need for this software to support personalization, independent learning, and data-driven instruction. Additionally, we present our rubric on the types of independent studies that software vendors had to produce, and the rigor necessary, to showcase the ways that their product could lead to greater gains than face-to-face tutoring. We used ‘What Works Clearing House’ as a standard for the “tiers of evidence” in the study. This paper highlights the processes as well as the rubrics that were developed for this evaluation process by analyzing the literature that grounded the development of the rubric and evaluation process. Furthermore, this paper highlights the rubric itself.

Finally, this paper also showcases the ways that the rubric was used to determine and approve valuable personalized software programs.
Finally, the paper discussed the processes of including personalized software as part of a policy solution to address gaps in student learning. The state of Texas includes 5.9 million students across approximately 1400 school districts and charter networks. The students are divers in both rurality and urban location. The ability to find software programs that address the need for personalized learning supports is important to all governments grappling with addressing student learning needs.

Keywords: Personalized learning, governmental statute, evaluation.